Talk: I’ll be giving a talk about the role of open source development in higher ed institutions at the upcoming Tennessee Higher Education Information Technology Symposium in Chattanooga Tennessee. The talk will focus on the experience I had with the UTHSC-WPCAS plugin developed for UTHSC and encourage Higher-Ed tech professionals to consider open sourcing their work and to consider open source options when making IT decisions.

What is “wpautop”?

Well, to put it simply, wpautop is short for ‘WordPress Auto P’- with p being in reference to an html p tag. wpautop is a wordpress function that “Changes double line-breaks in the text into HTML paragraphs (

…

).” You can read more about it in the WordPress codex.

When I started using WordPress it was not nearly as powerful as it is now. Over time, the internet’s favorite open source Content management system has picked up a lot of really cool features that make it easier to work with and more capable of powering more dynamic and robust websites. When I really started to delve in to WordPress development, I had no idea how many tools were available right out of the box. Little by little, they all started to make sense and I started to utilize them effectively. Now that I am a little bit more comfortable, I think it might be helpful to share some of the things that I find most important as a web developer using WordPress.